Exploring Racial Bias Among Biracial and Single-Race Adults: The IAT

It’s hard to talk about race. Fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of expressing an unpopular view or simply the fear of offending others can dampen honest conversations about racial attitudes. Accurately measuring racial attitudes faces another formidable obstacle. Psychologists say that biased racial views are sometimes buried deep in a person’s subconscious, the byproducts of exposure to popular culture, the media and other factors. An Implicit Association Test (IAT), a technique that psychologists say measures subconscious or “hidden” bias by tracking how quickly individuals associate good and bad words with specific racial groups, was used for the report. [Note: contains copyrighted material].